Mobile robots are widely used in industrial environments and are expected to be widely available in human
environments in the near future, for example, in the area of care and service robots. This article proposes an
implementation for a highly customizable color recognitionmodule based on Field Programmable Gate Array
(FPGA) hardware to accomplish tasks like real-time frame processing for image streams. In comparison to
a pure software solution on a CPU, an attached FPGA-based hardware accelerator enables real-time image
processing and significantly reduces the required computing power of the CPU. Instead, the CPU can be used
for tasks that cannot be efficiently implemented on FPGAs, for example, because of a large control overhead.
We concentrate on a multirobot scenario where a group of robots follows a human team member by keeping a
specific formation in order to support the human in exploration and object detection. Additionally, the robots
provide a communication infrastructure to maintain a stable multihop communication network between
the human and a base station recording all actions and evaluating the captured images and transmitted
data. Depending on the current operating conditions, the robot system has to be able to execute a wide
variety of different tasks. Since only a small number of tasks have to be executed concurrently, dynamic
reconfiguration of the FPGA can be used to avoid the parallel implementation of all tasks on the FPGA.
Within this context, this article discusses application fields where dynamic reconfiguration of FPGA-based
coprocessors significantly reduces the CPU load and presents examples of how dynamic reconfiguration can
be used in exploration